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There Is a Point At Which It Will Make Economical Sense To Defect From the Electrical Grid (qz.com)
Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: More than 1 million U.S. homes have solar systems installed on their rooftops. Batteries are set to join many of them, giving homeowners the ability to not only generate but also store their electricity on-site. And once that happens, customers can drastically reduce their reliance on the grid. It's great news for those receiving utility bills. It's possible armageddon for utilities. A new study by the consulting firm McKinsey modeled two scenarios: one in which homeowners leave the electrical grid entirely, and one in which they obtain most of their power through solar and battery storage but keep a backup connection to the grid. Given the current costs of generating and storing power at home, even residents of sunny Arizona would not have much economic incentive to leave the electric-power system completely -- full grid-defection, as McKinsey refers to it -- until around 2028. But partial defection, where some homeowners generate and store 80% to 90% of their electricity on site and use the grid only as a backup, makes economic sense as early as 2020.
[A]s daily needs for many are supplied instead by solar and batteries, McKinsey predicts the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Utilities would step up and supply power during the few days or weeks per year when distributed systems run out of juice.
[A]s daily needs for many are supplied instead by solar and batteries, McKinsey predicts the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Utilities would step up and supply power during the few days or weeks per year when distributed systems run out of juice.
The power companies are still going to charge the same amount people are paying now even though they're buying less energy. I don't know how much the spend on the actual fuel for their power plants but I doubt their overall operating costs would go down much.
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Well we now have your post and you're the biggest fucking nutcase of all
Microgrids and community storage? Power co-ops?
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think the incumbent utilities do have a lot to worry about (in the long-term) since entire communities may decide that they can pool their panels and storage at a lower cost than the utilities can provide. It will make sense to have as many homes as possible be self-sufficient, but it will also make sense to have the capability for neighbors to share power resources. This process will be very complex to navigate, since it's unlikely that the utilities will be willing to just abandon their equipment and let it be used (and upgraded) by localities.
Also at some point, it will make economic sense to not only feed the grid with power when storage is full on a sunny day, but also feed the grid with stored power when you know it's going to be sunny tomorrow. That still doesn't solve the base-load problem (for when you know it's NOT going to be sunny for a week), but it's a start.
It may be that utility-scale power will eventually only directly serve metro areas. Maybe they'll like that? Not having to maintain roadside lines and domestic interconnects in the less populated places?
Solar only for the rich is indeed a scary prospect -- though if only the rich get solar, the utilities will still have plenty of customers, since the "rich" are, at most, 10% of the US population, and it's commerce and industry that use the lion's share of generated electricity.
Also, I'd bet at least half of those 1 million homes have solar city or the like, with no out-of-pocket expense by the homeowner. I'd expect that to continue, especially in areas with higher than average electricity costs.
I'd be happy if we could just get gov't out of the 'paying half the cost of every solar install in the US' business, and stop forcing my electrical supplier to pay a premium for unneeded electricity that homeowners solar panels generate...
Ken
If I want to be off grid I need to:
Have storage for multiple days if the sun doesn't shine.
Have excess generation capacity
Have enough power in my batteries to power all my appliances at once.
Now if I get together with a few neighbours I don't need as much excess, since the likely hood of us all turning on every appliance is low we wouldn't need as much absolute power, and we could share some costs of the circuitry. If my neighbourhood got together with another neighbourhood we could save even more and if we got together with neighbourhoods geographically separated from us it would be even better. Ideally we would create a grid stretching across the contentment so that we could share power with people in other time zones or to take advantage of things like potential energy in river water, or maybe a instead of putting our solar panels on the roof we could put them all somewhere more convenient that gets more sun. Maybe we could even pay someone else to manage all this stuff. Get them to do the research, borrow money to build the infrastructure, manage the lines between me and my neighbours,.. I wonder what we would call a company that would do all this for us?
1 kilowatt per square meter is a huge amount of power. Assuming the sun only shines 6 hours a day (it's more of course, but less intense towards sunrise and sunset), that means each square meter gets 6 kWh of energy per day. Average consumption for a US home is about 30 kWh per day. So just 5 square meters of perfectly-efficient panels is enough to satisfy their power needs. In short, there is no shortage of solar energy.
1) There is a maximum amount of solar energy available. In round numbers, it's approximately 1 kilowatt per square metre at the earth's surface... period... end of story. You're *NOT* going to see a "Moore's Law" boosting solar panels every year into infinity. Current solar panels are from 15 to 23 percent efficient, and degrade with age. Yes, there is room for improvement, but there is a hard ceiling.
Fortunately that's more than 160x the amount that the US currently consumes. Even assuming you made no efficiency improvements (reduced consumption, improved PV panels) you would only need about 0.6% of your land mass to provide all the electrical energy you currently consume (plus storage of course). And no-one is suggesting 100% solar, just to be clear, it's merely pointing out how much energy there is available.
2) Solar panels produce 300 times as much toxic waste per unit of energy output versus nuclear powerplants http://www.theenergycollective... Definitely *NOT* "green".
Long ago debunked.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I have the technical skill and equipment and resources (domain, web hosting) to run my own email server. I actually did it for 3 years. Eventually I gave up and switched to a hosted service (first yahoo, then gmail).
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server. So I switched my email service to one run by a company who monitors it 24/7, notices outages within minutes instead of hours or days, and has expert staff who are more skilled at fixing it than I ever could be unless I quit my day job.
Unless you're an expert at diagnosing and fixing home solar installations and batteries, and can drop whatever you're doing at any time of the day (or night) to run home and fix it when the wife calls to say the house has no electricity, you don't want to be off the grid. Sometimes the first indication you'll have of a problem with your array will be when your battery dies because it hasn't been getting any power from the panels all day. Then you'll be stuck trying to fix it without the benefit of having electricity (to, say, search the net to try to help diagnose what the problem might be). Even if you've got a backup generator, it requires at least annual maintenance and the fuel has to be refreshed (gas goes bad after about 6-12 months, quicker if it's an ethanol blend and your storage container isn't completely airtight).
Things that you use intermittently like a car or a washing machine, it's OK to own because you can survive a short downtime without it if it should break. Things that need close to 100% uptime like electricity or email or phone service, you want it provided by a company with staff on hand 24/7 dedicated to providing it and fixing it when it breaks. Solar panels on your home supplement this reliable power source, not the other way around.
I guess you live in America where typical things we consider to describe 'a civilization' don't exist?
I do live in America. Growing up on a farm we had sheds full of what many not familiar with the culture would call "junk". We kept this stuff around because it wasn't junk, it was spare parts. We could not just run to the corner store for something, work had to be done and get done while the sun shined. Even I was amazed at the tools, spare parts, and "junk" in a rancher's shed when on a school trip to South Dakota. I then realized that the stuff we had was what we needed when "civilization" was a half hour drive away. For these people it was two or three times that, and so they had to be prepared for that.
When you are that far from "civilization" and you have to drive an hour to get there in an emergency, can you be sure "civilization" didn't just decide to move another hour away? You can't. So you need something that can get you far enough, and back again, without having to stop for an hour to recharge. People out that far will have a 4WD truck and put spare fuel cans in the back. Also back there will be water, food, a tent, a change of clothes, and a tent. Oh, and a roll of toilet paper and a shovel.
And how many people in the world life at such a shitty place you do that their half full electric car wont bring them to a safe place, or that utilities, military or civilian aid organizations have not set up emergency power in hours?
I don't know for sure but I can imagine answering with "billions" isn't too far from the truth.
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